ABlog

“Finally, I had this moment where someone was listening. It was amazing to be heard. When it disappears, and you’re back in the dark again, it’s sort of disappointing,” says Jean Rohe in a comment on the media reaction to her New School commencement speech. Or at least that’s how she’s quoted by the ever-patronizing Clyde Haberman in his Times column in today’s Metro section (Tuesday, June 6, 2006, p. B1).

It’s a significant problem, in an age like this, when any campaign or protest, no matter how successful, comes to an end. You feel so empty, so useless. So unheeded in the larger scheme of things. Never mind what you accomplished, it’s bound to look so small compared to the vast losses of recent years.

New School graduates made a resounding commencement day statement: we don’t like you, John McCain—not your condescension, not your politics in general, and definitely not your disgusting war.

The organs of transmission did their job—hurrah. But now it’s the day after. Both John McCain’s Republican nomination bid and the war he supports are roaring ahead, apparently unchecked.

And I, depleted in the comedown from the drug of organizing, find myself back with the endemic problem of planetary futurelessness from which I’d momentarily distracted myself with the sense of doing something, Something Important.

In this chastened state, I keep coming back to a couple of images from the recent events, together with reactions to books I’ve begun reading in that first flush of it’s summer and I don’t have to be a teacher for a while.

The images are those of the Powerful People (alias the War and Peace Criminals) who came into extraordinarily close range during the whole McCain affair. There’s a natural if misguided sense among us ordinary mortals that our contact with those who operate the levers of power ought to be in some way revelatory. I’m thinking, for example, of how Jean Rohe describes the surreal experience of glancing up from a booth in a diner to see her erstwhile adversary on a television screen (it turned out to be his Larry King Live appearance), making snide remarks about the New School. I had the sense that what got to her the most was, as with that “dark place,” her awareness of contrast. It was maddening to watch someone that powerful come within range, be briefly reduced to the status of a mere, vulnerable mortal--and then watch the playing field get tilted again. Power struck its tents and departed for realms in which it could once more enjoy its accustomed impunity.

I felt something rather different about Bob Kerrey, when our small delegation of students and faculty met with him to present the signed petitions asking that he withdraw the McCain invitation. That man looks positively hollow. There's no there there. He seems to be all strategy, all well-rehearsed maneuver. (Though people who meet with him in more “collegial” settings say he can be charming in a calculated way.) His face looks slightly artificial (“he’s had work done!” says my informant, the renegade trustee)--perfectly complementing his considerable amount of purely instrumental political intelligence. There must be emotion there somewhere, but don’t bother looking for it; it’s been successfully tucked away in an airtight compartment.

They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace.
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
A face looked out but it wasn’t the King’s.
“He’s much too busy signing things,” says Alice.

By far the strangest of the “celebrity” moments that I personally experienced during the McCain effort took place as I waited to be interviewed in the dingy anteroom of the Regional Network News studios in Midtown Manhattan. My chair faced the glass doors through which visitors to the place had to be buzzed in. After I’d been cooling my heels for about ten minutes, the elevator just beyond the glass disgorged three women—one old, two young. As they stood in front of the doors awaiting entry, my mind formed the incredulous thought: But…is that Madeleine Albright?

And so it was; she was flogging a new book, looking like a very well turned out courtesan of a certain age. My own interview was of course delayed so I got to watch the whole thing, starting with the flurry of “Madame Secretary” and “so honored to have you with us”—a bow and arch gesture of kissing the proffered hand by a station employee who made the mistake of shaking my own plebian paw before I could reveal I was in no way connected to the statesman in heels.

Statesman or not, she too was kept cooling those heels for a few minutes, and as I sat only a yard or so from the former architect of mayhem, all I could think about was what it would be like to lean over and murmur, “So, do you still think the price was worth it?”—an allusion to her infamous comment justifying the Clinton-era decision to impose draconian sanctions on Iraq at the cost of an estimated 500,000 otherwise preventable deaths of children[1]

Of course I didn’t do it. I was too well-trained, not gutsy enough. But beyond that, I knew it would have been a cheap shot, calculated to score points and make me look righteous but incapable of reaching the real target, incapable of affecting outcomes or even punishing an actual perpetrator of crimes against humanity—in the shape of this impeccably color-coordinated and, come to think of it, rather attractive woman with a tasteful hunk of corsage-like jewelry firmly affixed to her lapel.

It’s a very long time since I read Eichmann in Jerusalem but I think this must be what Hannah Arendt meant by the banality of evil—this dismaying and disorienting sense of disproportion between the enormity of hideous results and the conventional motives and small-horizon thinking of those who work the levers. (And, no, I don’t mean that Madeleine Albright, or John McCain, or even Bob Kerrey—although excellent documentary evidence exists to suggest Bob’s status as a bona fide war criminal, and not merely a peace criminal like Albright—is the moral equivalent of a Nazi architect of the Final Solution. And yet. If slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and turning their country into a grotesque colonial appendage of the U.S. isn’t evil, and isn’t in some meaningful way related to the types of politics that produce genocide, then I think we might as well abandon any notion of ethics in political life.)

So, as I say, while mulling over these images, I’ve found my way to reading matter that, as usual, turns out to be somehow related. I want to read Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, but I haven’t got hold of it yet and instead I’ve begun Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (published by Harvard University Press in 2005), recommended to me by a colleague who used it in course he taught on the science and politics of the atom bomb. The book is fascinating, and (as I understand from critical commentary by historians in the field, also provided by my colleague) groundbreaking in its quite even-handed attention to interactions among U.S., the Soviet Union, and Japan, each of which had its own highly convoluted imperial motives in addition to complex internal political considerations affecting its maneuvers as the fateful U.S. plan to unleash nuclear weapons took shape. Yet the book’s language and level of analysis leave me with reactions similar to those I experienced with Madeleine Albright: how to put together, I mean really put together, the horrors of history with all this relatively bland diplomatic wheeling and dealing? What do these pictures of men in suits—FDR and Churchill with Stalin at Yalta, the Japanese cabinet ministers grouped in front of an anonymous building—have to do with the technically dazzling realization of a completely literal, no-detail-omitted Hell upon Earth’s surface?

My perception of this disconnect sent me back to reread Carol Cohn’s essay “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals” (published in the 1989 University of Chicago Press collection Feminist Theory in Practice and Process). Cohn wrote about her participant-observation in the culture of men whose job it was (and presumably still is) to “think the unthinkable.” I was amazed once more, as I always am in reading this piece, by Cohn’s account of the experience of learning the language of these planners of nuclear strategy, and her discovery that using that language gradually made it difficult if not impossible for her to express the concerns that prompted her initial immersion in these circles. Cohn hypothesizes that “nukespeak” reduces nuclear anxiety by positioning those who wield it as the agents of nuclear destruction rather than its targets: doers, not sufferers. Most astonishingly, she points out that much of this exceedingly abstract theorizing about how nuclear annihilation might unfold is done not from the perspective of any human actors, but from the “standpoint” of the bombs and missiles whose specific configuration is seen as the rational “incentive” to launch a nuclear war: “Human death simply is ‘collateral damage’—collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves….[I]f human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Hence, questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be dismissed easily. No one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand to ask” (131-132).

Finally, I read my Goddard colleague Juliana Spahr’s thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs, whose “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003” attempts boldly to take on this incommensurability of the logic of weapons of aggression and the logic of human biology and feeling by, in effect, approaching the problem from a direction exactly opposite to that attempted by Carol Cohn. Rather than try to introduce the language of human care into an abstract discourse on the “rationality” of nuclear annihilation, she starts with the lovers’ bed; into its language of emotional intimacy and sensuous pleasure, she then inserts numbing litanies of military hardware that somehow become the frame for, and implicitly the meaning of, the personal transaction: “When I rest my head upon yours breasts, I rest upon the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Theodore Roosevelt.//Guided missile frigates, attack submarines, oilers, and amphibious transport dock/ships follow us into bed” (75).

Of course it’s not enough. Simply forcing the two kinds of language into the same frame doesn’t explain what we desperately want to know: “How can the power of our combination of intimacy and isolation have so little power outside the space of our bed?” (26). And yet the wonder is that the juxtaposition seems, after all, not nearly as artificial as we might have anticipated. Transmitted by broadcast media, this language that operates from the “standpoint” of weapons systems long ago took up its place in our bedrooms and other intimate domestic spaces.

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[1] Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.--60 Minutes (5/12/96)

Quoted by Rahul Mahajan in Extra, November/December 2001